


Mnemosyne

by pinkcupboardwitch



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: F/M, Funerals, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 17:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21256715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/pseuds/pinkcupboardwitch
Summary: Camilla, Virginia-born and bred, cool as a lily among ice, listens to the sonorous Catholic sermon and thinks of gods.





	Mnemosyne

**Author's Note:**

> For an anonymous Tumblr prompt: loss, fixation, memory for Henry n Camilla

She wears white to his funeral. Lilies of the valley are pinned to her breast. Their scent mixes with that of the incense in the censors, spiraling up towards the sky like a bloodless shadow of sacrifice.

Camilla, Virginia-born and bred, cool as a lily among ice, listens to the sonorous Catholic sermon and thinks of gods.

They had believed, after all. Not just in Dionysus Omadius, Dionysus the Raw-Eater, although that had been present too. But had it not lurked there in the background all along, the hubristic belief that this was a deed of heroes? The awareness that the very greatest heroes could become the center of cult in their own right? And so immortal.

_They_. If perhaps by that she does not mean the four of them, she means two. She and Henry. The first time in her life _they _and_ two _had not meant she and Charles. That had been the beginning of it.

Henry who had winked at her, slow and majestically sly across Julian’s classroom. Henry who made no bones of his distaste for the Romans (“decadent self-absorbed bureaucrats who can only dream of reaching half Hellas’s glory”), but still sat gravely with her as she read Ovid, all those stories of rape and transformation. Catullus and his ecstasies. Fulvia stabbing the dead Cicero’s tongue with her hairpins. One might say, more like a brother to her than her own beloved Charles. 

Until one day - his hands under her skirt, his glasses bumping at the hinge of her jaw as his teeth scrape lower. Just a man after all. _Just _a man. 

The shock had almost been as great as when she tumbled out of a goddess’s body and back into her mute own. It is one thing to couple and howl in the wild with the god thrumming mad all around them. It is another to be pulled into a hotel room, unceremoniously stripped, and turned face down.

Was this how Artemis had felt? she wonders. When she called Orion friend and then one day looked up to see him watching her. His gaze as fixed as though she were a moth and he a pin that sought to ram through her and fix her to a mattress.

The myths had been surprisingly circumspect on that. Had Orion loved her? None say. Had she loved him? None say. But Apollo had believed she did.

A brother’s belief and a sister’s deed. Over the millennia and a hundred retellings, they begin to look alike. By looking alike, they become alike.

_Light from a distant star_, Julian had called the dead once. No. The dead are memories. A hero is nothing if not remembered as a hero. A goddess is not unchaste if none remember her lovers.

Charles is ruined, Francis is blubbering, Dick is absent, Bunny is gone. Camilla is cool, cool, cool, white as an ivory hairpin, and she remembers. She chooses how she will remember. 

_Ave atque vale._

_Hail and farewell,_ ** _ brother_**_. _


End file.
